Grey. grey grass, grey sky, grey mountains, grey land. Everything Jasper had done had led them here. The highlands. Every choice, every word spoken. The wind blew through the grass, sending the smell of rotten summer through the air and bringing with it the knowledge, but not yet fall of the coming night.
Pain ebbed and flowed through the world, breathing and breaking on the sparks that lit the paths of distant cities, cities where Jasper was no longer welcome. There were no travellers here. That was a given. There were no travellers here. Lesser men were wise enough not to stray from their graves these days.
Jasper’s boots were worn, their coat patched and their mask cracked, but that was okay this far away from the civilised kingdoms. There was nothing for them here, but that was better than the flames and death they had left in their wake. It wasn’t as bad as they imagined, they hoped that much. Or maybe it was, there was no way to tell. Their memory was cracked at best and everyone else who had been there when it happened was dead.
Their blond hair was tucked up into their hat, and the only other notable feature about them was shattered, so even if they encountered another traveller, and even if that traveller looked close enough or had heard the rumours of stories, they weren’t the Eldir without it. Now they were just Jasper, with their strange accent from a town so far east that it wasn’t on any maps, and scars that they could have passed off as from a bad childhood.
It wasn’t that they didn’t want to be recognized, it wasn’t that they didn’t want to shout their name and title for all to hear, and it wasnt that the travellers this close to the mountains would even care what happened in the capital of another kingdom to a man they had never heard more than whispers of, but there was always the chance of ears on the wind and true sight in the eyes of horses, and Jasper couldn’t risk it.
And so they had come here. They walked, and they hummed their songs, and they remembered everything that they had done wrong, every choice they had made, every wrong word said and everything they could have done to help.
Every step in the right direction brought them closer to a place they had only ever heard sung of, a place they didn’t even know the name of. It was supposed to be better there, a place they could mend all their years of wrongs.
The sun bled down behind the mountains and Jasper stopped underneath a wilting tree. They breathed in the smells of this place, felt that writhing turning wrong deep, deep inside. They didn’t eat, that wasn’t something that needed doing anymore, and they didn’t sleep. They just sat and watched and waited.
Slowly the sun peaked above the mountains and began to warm this god forsaken land. Jasper stood, brushed the dirt from their clothing and started down the road again, humming a tune from somewhere they couldn’t quite remember.
Halfway through the day, Jasper came to a crossroads. There was no sign, no painted rock, nothing marking the right way. One led straight, following the line the mountains carved in the earth and cutting across the barren plains. The other led into the mountains, nothing more than a footpath compared to the roads Jasper was used to. They took that one.
As soon as they passed into the shadow of the mountains they felt it. It felt like distant bells and the smell of strawberries in the summer sun. Jasper hadn’t even fled ten paces before the dogs were on top of them. They screamed, kicking and thrashing at the snarling wild things, but they held firm. They surrounded them, a mad mass of growling and barking.